Book Of Demons Pops Up On Early Access

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Papery tribute to the Diablo series, Book of Demons [official site], has been released on Steam Early Access, offering players the chance to totter through a dark and dangerous dungeon with a little cardboard cut-out man wielding some cards. Truly, you are a force to be reckoned with. Look upon this trailer, ye mighty, and despair.

Described as a “deck-building hack and slash adventure” set in an arts ‘n’ crafts world called the Paperverse, Book of Demons is a pastiche of ye olde dungeon-crawling RPGs, in which adventurers pick a class – Knight, Rogue or Mage – and build a deck of useful cards, instead of relying on a stat-based system of leveling up and up. Some cards will let you throw poison bombs, some will erect ice walls and others will summon golems.

But it also doesn’t want you to forget about your supper, so there’s a system in place to adjust the time each procedurally generated dungeon will take to trounce through, in an effort to suit whatever you like best. The game will observe the way you play and limit or extend the time of each level accordingly, say developers Thing Trunk.

This is all part of their Return 2 Games series, which promises to take the ideas of yesteryear and rejuvenate them for the modern day wastrel. Their plan is to make seven new games (each one a “Book of X”) all based on classics but adding modern twists and making them more accessible to the time-constrained adults of today.

I see a lot of talk about this sort of thing, people praising games for “respecting my time.” Personally, I can’t think of anything more frown-worthy. I yearn for time-sinks. I like my vidyagames disrespectful. But then again, I don’t have children or any other disgusting domestic creature in my life. What about you, dads and mums, boys and girls? Is all you want a little respect? Does card-collecting dungeon-crawling do it for you?

Also, I was a bit surprised to see RPS getting the quotes treatment in that trailer. When I looked into the “nostalgia without disappointments” comment, I discovered it came from Melody’s news post, who used the phrase more as a matter of speculation than a statement of fact. Cheeky, marketing. Very cheeky.

11 Comments

Also, count me among the interested about length-adjustment. I often find myself choosing what my game of the night will be based on the time I have. My favorite length is 20 minutes, by the way: if a session goes bad, often I can just go through a new run before the evening runs out.

Sadly, I have long ago abandoned most long-running games, as they require too much continued attention (sometimes can’t play for a week, then I come back and it’s all “where was I? Why do I care?”). Last I played was Deus Ex: Human Revolution last year (that’s right: 5 years after its release)…

Hey guys! First of all big thanks for writing about us, it means a lot. We meant no disrespect with using that quote. It was an honest mistake, we picked it from the coverage we had because it fit so well and apparently we didn’t pay enough attention to the context. It turned out very cheeky indeed. If we could we would now use this quote to reflect that :-) But jokes aside, I hope you won’t hold the grudge.

I don’t have anyone at home competing with games for my time, but I am nonetheless equipped with a 40 hour work week, and other interests besides videogames, including cooking, movies, television, books, comics, boardgames and so on, and there are more games coming out literally every week, so expecting me to dedicate months to a particular game really is not realistic.

Sounds a lot like Card Hunter (whis remains to this day an excellent, highly recommended game). The time adjustment sounds potentially useful, although it would have to be very deftly implemented to not just break the fourth wall and make plain the meaninglessness of it all.

Yeah, I cannot believe we made it through all of the article and comments before someone mentioned Card Hunter, which was a charming and novel take on the Fantasy Party RPG with Deck Building. They had the benefit of a witty framing device though, I am interested to see what they do here.